‘Buying Dad’ — One Woman’s Hunt for the Perfect Sperm Donor

[I am at the beach today and will return tomorrow if I don’t get stung to death by the influx of jellyfish we are having here in New Jersey. This is a repost of one of the first reviews that appeared on this site.]

Two lesbians look for the father of their child in a tank of liquid nitrogen

Harlyn Aizley rejoiced when she saw all the choices that sperm banks offered to people like her — “Jewish gay Gemini neurotics” in their late 30s. Leafing through books of donor profiles, she found that “buying sperm is much like shopping at Sam’s Club or Costco.” The trouble began when she and her partner downloaded the catalog of a California sperm bank, chose a donor they nicknamed Baldie, and had vials of his semen shipped to their home in Boston by Federal Express. After repeated failures to conceive, the couple learned that no woman had ever gotten pregnant with their donor’s sperm and that they had to start over.

It’s an understatement to say that Aizley’s instinct for wisecracking doesn’t allow her to look too closely at the moral or social implications of buying sperm like six-packs of Wild Cherry Coke. But if her breezy memoir lacks depth, it has the ring of hard-won authority and the consolation of a happy ending. Many couples, heterosexual or homosexual, may wish that they had read Buying Dad before spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on the DNA of their offspring. “The donors you want are the ones who have gotten somebody pregnant,” Aizley says with unassailable logic. “It’s as simple as that.”

Best line: “To the argument that gay parents will create gay children, I have only this to say: Every homosexual I know, male or female, was raised by two heterosexuals.”

Worst line: “March is the suckiest of all months.” Be grateful that Aizley didn’t collaborate with T.S. Eliot on The Wasteland.

Recommended if … you’re straight or gay, married or single, and thinking of using a sperm bank.